In everyday life, people purchase goods and/or services that they need in order to maintain or increase their quality of life, to affect their happiness, accomplish goals, and for many other reasons. Some of those goods and/or services include such things as food, electricity service, water service, a garbage pickup service, rent or a mortgage associated with a home, and many other goods and/or services. For each of these goods and/or services, a consumer making the purchase will either pay for the goods and/or services at the time of purchase, or will receive an invoice or bill for the goods and/or services at a later date. Occasionally, a purchase of goods and/or services will be a single, one-time purchase.
Some goods and/or services are purchased on an ongoing basis, such as gas for an automobile, electricity to power a home, regular deliveries of food, municipal water service, cell phone or other telephone related service, Internet service, or any other goods and/or services a consumer purchases on an ongoing basis. Often, regularly purchased goods and/or services are invoiced periodically, and payment is made by the consumer accordingly. Goods and/or services may also be purchased using a revolving credit account, such as a credit card account or other revolving credit account, which is billed regularly, such as weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.
It is not uncommon for a person to have more than one credit card, a rent or mortgage bill, an electric utility bill, a phone bill, and many other bills to pay on a regular basis, such as on a monthly basis. Even when payments on various bills are due over the same period, such as monthly, those payments will often have different due dates. For example, a mortgage or rent payment may be due on the 1st, 5th, 10th, or any other day of each month, and payments on various credit card bills may be due, for example, on the 5th, 7th, 17th and the 19th of the month, or any other day of each month, depending on a wide variety of factors. Payments on other bills such as internet service, water and/or electric service, and garbage pickup service may be due on any previously mentioned dates, or on other dates.
It is not uncommon for a person to have more than one income pay date within a given period, such as within a given month. Some people are paid once a month, while others are paid twice a month, such as on the 1st day and 15th day of the month, while still others are paid weekly, such as every Friday, or biweekly, such as every other Friday. In other situations, such as when a contractor is working for one or more clients, income pay dates for the contractor may be at least partly determined by when the clients pay the contractor, and income pay dates for the contractor may thus vary substantially, with one or more pay dates occasionally being more than a month apart.
With the numbers of bills that households have, and the number of times income amounts are paid into the household, when there is not enough income being received to pay each debt in full each month, determining which bills to pay, an amount to pay, and a date to pay them is a complex task which is often beyond the skills of the person needing to make the payment.
For example, a person being paid biweekly receives an average of just over two paychecks each month, and receives three paychecks in each of two of the months of the year, approximately six months apart. Thus, income is received, in such circumstances, at varying dates during different months. However, regardless of when income amounts are received for a given month, bills are each typically due on fixed dates and thus will typically be due on the same dates each month. Because the dates that income amounts arrive will vary over each month, budgeting becomes a rather complex process.
In some situations, computing system solutions have been employed which help a consumer pay bills. Typical computing solutions include processes which receive user input directing certain payments to be made at certain dates, and alerting the user when a payment would cause a budget to be overrun. However, these typical computing solutions are technically inefficient because the computing processes are typically designed for use by a single user, and those computing processes have to wait for user decision input in many cases in order to proceed with bill payment.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have an automated system and method for analyzing income and expenses, resulting in automated optimization of budgeted fund allocation to pay bills. It would be further beneficial to have a multi-user system that can operate on billing data of many users.